Editorial: Charters, choice are strangling our public schools

The people behind the charter school and privatization movement are intent on destroying public schools, and they are succeeding. In so doing, they are literally depriving children of the promise of a quality education and doing immeasurable harm to our democracy.

It doesn't require an advanced degree to recognize what the so-called reform movement is doing to our schools. Choice, vouchers and charter schools - and a flawed, market-driven funding mechanism that treats children like commodities - is literally forcing schools over the financial cliff, but not before the slow burn of austerity and scarcity deprives the most vulnerable of our children access to adequately resourced classrooms and staff equipped to meet their needs.

The tragedy of what happened to Albion's public high school might seem an outlier, but in fact it is the proverbial canary the coal mine.

And make no mistake: No matter how well the merger of Marshal and Albion high schools is managed, the closure of Albion high is a crushing blow to the community and an inexcusable failure of the state.

And you can expect to see more of the same in the years to come.

The financial crisis facing Michigan's public schools is only getting worse. The Detroit News reported last week that "a growing number of Michigan school districts face higher borrowing costs after downgrades this year by Moody's Investors Service, which cited financial pressure stemming from falling enrollment and charter school growth.

The bond rating agency has downgraded 53 Michigan school districts since January, almost as many as the previous two years combined.

What's going on? Blame the exodus of students and families fleeing under-resourced districts and classrooms in neighborhoods increasingly segregated by income. According to the Moody's report, 425 of the state's 549 public school districts lost students between 2004 and 2012, with total enrollment slipping 13.2 percent.

The self-anointed reformers call this the market at work, a function of competition that will reward excellence and eventually raise all boats. Don't believe it.

The reformers, in Michigan and across the nation, see profit in the privatization of our schools, and they will stop at nothing to undermine confidence in public education in an effort to divert taxpayer money into businesses with little or no accountability to the public.

More than 80 percent of the charter schools in Michigan are operated for profit, and if anybody believes that the profit model is more effective than traditional public schools, they are either uninformed or unwilling to look at facts.

The education journal Rethinking Schools recently cited a 2009 national study of charter school performance by CREDO, a research unit at Stanford University that supports charter "reform." The study found that only about one in five charter schools had better test scores than comparable public schools and more than twice as many had lower ones.

Earlier this year, CREDO released an updated study that looked at charters in 27 states, and little had changed. As the National Education Policy Center explained, "The bottom line appears to be that, once again, it has been found that, in aggregate, charter schools are basically indistinguishable from traditional public schools in terms of their impact on academic test performance."

We would add one clarification to that conclusion: Charters by design do not accept kids with the greatest needs. Even when handpicking their students, charters can't outperform public schools, yet they operate relatively free of the public scrutiny that public schools by law must comply with.

Rather than educational excellence, profit and an ideological agenda hostile to teachers, teacher unions and government-funded education are the primary drivers of so-called reforms.

We've reported repeatedly on how concentrated poverty, combined with schools of choice and charter schools, is crippling efforts to deliver quality public education to low-income students. The class divide is effectively obliterating the promise of public education, creating districts that serve almost exclusively low-income students, many of whom have special needs that the districts are ill-equipped to meet.

It's not simply an attack on public schools, but on the very soul of our democracy, which requires a well-educated citizenry to function in best interests of the entire nation.

We need to stop the expansion of charters schools, vouchers and other fraud reforms and refocus public policy on providing excellent public schools for all. Time is running short.

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Editorial: Charters, choice are strangling our public schools

The people behind the charter school and privatization movement are intent on destroying public schools, and they are succeeding.